The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons

From 2004 to
2011, American and Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and at times
were wounded by, chemical weapons that were hidden or abandoned years
earlier.

It was August
2008 near Taji, Iraq. They had just exploded a stack of old Iraqi
artillery shells buried beside a murky lake. The blast, part of an
effort to destroy munitions that could be used in makeshift bombs,
uncovered more shells.

Two technicians
assigned to dispose of munitions stepped into the hole. Lake water
seeped in. One of them, Specialist Andrew T. Goldman, noticed a pungent
odor, something, he said, he had never smelled before.

He lifted a
shell. Oily paste oozed from a crack. “That doesn’t look like pond
water,” said his team leader, Staff Sgt. Eric J. Duling.

The specialist
swabbed the shell with chemical detection paper. It turned red —
indicating sulfur mustard, the chemical warfare agent designed to burn a
victim’s airway, skin and eyes.

All three men recall an awkward pause. Then Sergeant Duling gave an order: “Get the hell out.”

Five years after
President George W. Bush sent troops into Iraq, these soldiers had
entered an expansive but largely secret chapter of America’s long and
bitter involvement in Iraq.

From 2004 to
2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered,
and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons
remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.

In all, American
troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads,
shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of
participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

The United States had gone to war
declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program.
Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from
the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration
with the West.

The New York
Times found 17 American service members and seven Iraqi police officers
who were exposed to nerve or mustard agents after 2003. American
officials said that the actual tally of exposed troops was slightly
higher, but that the government’s official count was classified.

The secrecy fit
a pattern. Since the outset of the war, the scale of the United States’
encounters with chemical weapons in Iraq was neither publicly shared
nor widely circulated within the military. These encounters carry
worrisome implications now that the Islamic State, a Qaeda splinter
group, controls much of the territory where the weapons were found.

The American
government withheld word about its discoveries even from troops it sent
into harm’s way and from military doctors. The government’s secrecy,
victims and participants said, prevented troops in some of the war’s
most dangerous jobs from receiving proper medical care and official
recognition of their wounds.

“I felt more like a guinea pig than
a wounded soldier,” said a former Army sergeant who suffered mustard
burns in 2007 and was denied hospital treatment and medical evacuation
to the United States despite requests from his commander.

Congress, too,
was only partly informed, while troops and officers were instructed to
be silent or give deceptive accounts of what they had found. “ 'Nothing
of significance’ is what I was ordered to say,” said Jarrod Lampier, a
recently retired Army major who was present for the largest chemical
weapons discovery of the war: more than 2,400 nerve-agent rockets
unearthed in 2006 at a former Republican Guard compound.

Jarrod L.
Taylor, a former Army sergeant on hand for the destruction of mustard
shells that burned two soldiers in his infantry company, joked of
“wounds that never happened” from “that stuff that didn’t exist.” The
public, he said, was misled for a decade. “I love it when I hear, ‘Oh
there weren’t any chemical weapons in Iraq,’ ” he said. “There were
plenty.”

Chemical Weapons Found by American Forces in Iraq

Between 2004 and 2011, American forces in Iraq encountered thousands ofchemical munitions. In several cases, troops were exposed to chemical agents.

SOME EXPOSURES DETAILED IN THIS ARTICLE
1MAY 2004
Two soldiers exposed to sarin from a shell near Baghdad’s Yarmouk neighborhood.
2SUMMER 2006
Over 2,400 nerve-agent rockets found at this former Republican Guard compound.
3JULY 2008
Six Marines exposed to mustard agent from an artillery shell at an abandoned bunker.
4AUGUST 2008
Five American soldiers exposed to mustard agent while destroying a weapons cache.
52010 OR EARLY 2011
Hundreds of mustard rounds discovered in a container at this Iraqi security compound.

Rear Adm. John
Kirby, spokesman for Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, declined to address
specific incidents detailed in the Times investigation, or to discuss
the medical care and denial of medals for troops who were exposed. But
he said that the military’s health care system and awards practices were
under review, and that Mr. Hagel expected the services to address any
shortcomings.